FROM THE JUNE ABA JOURNALThe E-AlternativeOnline mock juries offer cheap and fast opinions

BY BRAD L.F. HOESCHEN

Chris Bagby put together a mock jury to measure damages for a victim
of an airline crash and another for an unsuspecting diner who was served
a chalupa with a screw cooked inside.

There is almost always enough money at stake in an airline crash
case to justify the expense of a mock jury, but damages from a tainted
chalupa usually can't cover the $20,000 to $35,000 expense of staging a
mock trial.

Bagby's fledgling company, E-jury.net in Arlington, Texas, uses
virtual jurors to chop 90 percent of the cost out of the process, while
providing attorneys with input from potential jurors in the county where
the litigation is pending.

E-jury.net has about 400 prospective jurors in five Texas counties,
with plans to expand.

Other electronic juries take a more national focus. They
recruit juries an any community the client chooses. LitiComm
OnLine in Chicago and Virtualjury, with locations in Dallas and Houston,
establish electronic pools on demand.

"We can select a group in a particular federal district or
state, depending on the client need," says Robert Gordon, chief
research scientist for Virtualjury, which is associated with the
Wilmington Institute of Trial and Settlement Sciences in Addison, Texas.

Both LitiComm and Virtualjury offer real-time deliberations in a chat
room. LitiComm generally gathers six to eight people on a panel
and tells them to expect about 45 minutes of deliberations, says
Emmanuel Mackey, director of operations for LitiComm, a subsidiary of
Carlton Trial Consulting & Research Center, Inc. in Chicago.

Virtualjury allows the lawyer to masquerade as a juror to see how
jurors react to certain comments.

By contrast, E-jury.net solicits responses from as many as 50 online
jurors, but the group never deliberates as a whole.

Vic Anderson, who used E-jury.net, had a particularly sympathetic
injury case. But it had some circumstances that could have turned
jurors off. E-jury.net provided a wide range of reactions,
including tips on how to present the case, says Anderson, a Fort Worth
lawyer.

Arlington lawyer Michael Heygood submitted a medical malpractice case
through E-jury to a pool that included a couple of nurses.

"They pointed out to us that we had made a mistake in the
medical terminology," he says. "If that had happened at
trial and someone on the jury noticed it, we would have looked very
silly."

One of the keys to making an electronic jury useful, however, is
accurately representing the entire case, Heygood says. The lawyer
boil the case down to five or 10 pages. "The results I get
are only as good as I represent the other side of the case," he
says. "This tool won't be useful if I weight everything in my
favor."

Other electronic jury companies allow lawyers to submit specific
pieces of evidence or a written opening or closing statement to get the
reactions of jurors. Anything the lawyer wants to submit can
generally go to most online juries.

The Down Side
Still, electronic juries have detractors. Some complain that
without real deliberations there is no way to tell how the jury would
actually rule. Others contend that the virtual jury eliminates all
that body language and tone of voice can send.

"Opinions can change a lot in the group dynamic, and you tend to
lose that electronically," says Harriet Poster, senior project
director for Mar's Research in Coral Springs, Fla. "It has
the potential to alter the outcome."

There is also the problem of electronic juries only reaching people
who own computers.

Anderson, however, isn't terribly worried about reaching the
technologically challenged. "The people without computers are
the people who don't show up for jury duty, and when they do they are
the followers," he says. "I want to find out what the
leaders are thinking, and those people have computers."